Rockism, Poptism and Me
It feels odd to respond to a Slate article (http://www.slate.com/id/2141418/) in this blog. After all, at some point I decided to regulate my serious writing to real outlets - keep my personal blog for personal writing. But something ticked me off about the article, and like one of my old livejournal posts - where I said blogging let's you explore your feeling without the burden of commitment - I want to explore the piece. The article was about popism, or poptomism - basically, the response to Rockism. Rockism occurs when you divide pop music into high v. low culture. Dylan, Young, etc become High Culture. Maria Carey, Celine Dion, and 50 Cent would then be considered low brow. Popism is the attempt to destroy those high/low culture lines.

The Slate article (Jody Rosen, btw) makes an interesting point. She writes that Rock Criticism was originally designed to liberate rock from low-brow (as compared to Opera, Classical, etc). But that they just succeeding in making another division. If I wanted to embrace Derrida here, I'd argue with Rosen that the division is inevitable. It's our nature to divide everything into categories of meaning and less-meaning. Even within Popism there are "good" guilty pleasure songs and "bad" ones. Even if a critic like Frere-Jones wants to embrace Gangsta-Rap, I imagine she'll concede that Bonecrusher is still bad. Evaluation of any kind puts the evaluated into different categories. Popism fully realized will merely redefine the lines of high brow and low brow. It may admit some more artists into the cannon, but will continue to eliminate other perspectives.

That isn't what bothered me. I'm not going to evoke Derrida here (even if that may be too late) because I want to rely on personal experience instead. I've enjoyed both the classic cannon of Rock music, and guilty pleasures. My iPod runs the gamut of Hair-Metal (Motley Crue) to Annie (which might be the most remarkable case of Rockists embracing overtly pop music. I call her "Brittney Spears" for people who are too embarrased to listen to Toxic) to loads of Emo. That said, I find that I continue to return to certain artists and certain periods of musical history. Both Bob Dylan and Sufjan Stevens have been extensively played on my iPod. This may say more about me, the listener, than the music, agreed. Yet I want to believe that certain types of music have greater resonance for the listener. A person, safe to say, returns to music that touches him the deepest. Especially when that connection is forged in the person's earlier years, it has a firmer grip on his listening. That's why my father may appreciate Travis, but is devoted to Dylan. My mother enjoys Guns and Roses, but she'll always go back to Neil Young.

The most played album on my iPod is Joni Mitchell's Blue. I've listened to it when I was happy, when I was depressed, and when I was completely numbed. It's made me cry, laugh, and chatter about her brilliance to hundreds of people. I was not yet born when Mitchell wrote Blue, but I discovered it early enough in my life to make an impact on me. I also watched the Mickey Mouse Club when Spears, Timberlake and Aguilara were on it. My father played Dylan for me when I was young, which is why I listen to it obsessively now, but I also heard Green Day's Dookie at the same time. The point is that despite the confluence of musical imprints left on me while I was impressionable, today my tastes are defined. I may return to Dookie for nostalgia, or listen to Timberlake with detached interest, but Mitchell makes me sob. In this case, the Rockists were right. Blood on the Tracks is better than anything Z100 plays.

Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, and Thursday are writing incredible music today. They are writing albums that I keep returning to, and will - I imagine - keep returning to over my life. No matter how amazing I might have thought Ignition (Remix) was, and I loved it when I first heard it, I've never heard it since. I never had a compulsion to find it and play it again. I was never compelled by emotion or raw need to load it back up on my iPod. It is a guilty pleasure because it is shallow. It lacks the depth of these other bands. I don't intend to judge Frere-Jones, or any other music critic who wants to be a Poptist, but I believe they don't understand music in this context. I think they might be incredibly entertained by music, and even excited, but if they can't tell Aretha Franklin from Beyonce, they don't feel music. Jack White was interviewed in Guitarworld a few years ago, and he said (paraphrasing from memory) "If someone doesn't like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, they don't like music. They like the idea of music, and having music as a hobby. But they don't like music." It doesn't exactly fit here, but Rockism has something to do with feeling music, and Poptism has something to do with enjoying it. Maybe Motley Crue is just as good as Nirvana, but I can't remember the last time I listened to 1984. I screamed my lungs out singing along with Smells Like Teen Spirit yesterday.